(1953- ) American illustrator, husband of artist and author Janny Wurts. Maitz actually began his career in sf art before graduating from the Paier School of Art in 1975, and he quickly began receiving regular assignments to paint book covers. From the start, he placed an emphasis on human figures, often in unusual positions with distinctive facial expressions; his cover for L Sprague de Camp's The Virgin & the Wheels (coll 1976), for example, offers a novel take on the familiar trope of the sword-wielding barbarian defending a nubile maiden against bestial foes, and not merely because the barbarian sports a tail. Despite an early focus on works of Fantasy, Maitz also did covers for republications of Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr juveniles, the first editions of the four books in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980-1983 4vols), and an effective cover for a 1979 edition of Barry N Malzberg's Beyond Apollo (1972), wherein the troubled look on the central astronaut's face nicely captures the spirit of the novel. With his emphasis on portraiture rather than space hardware or alien landscapes, Maitz can be regarded as a forerunner of a shift in genre art that accompanied and facilitated its rise to mass-market popularity in the 1980s.

Maitz soon branched out into other areas, most notably by creating the very popular "Captain Morgan" character that adorned numerous advertisements for Seagram's Captain Morgan Spiced Rum and led to other assignments to illustrate pirates. But he and Michael Whelan dominated sf art during the 1980s, and while Whelan usually won the Hugo as Best Professional Artist, Maitz was regularly nominated, and finally won the award in 1990 and 1993. He also earned the first of his ten Spectrum Awards for his cover for Hugh Cook's Wizard War (1987), an imaginative rendering, mostly in purple and green, of an enigmatic figure emerging in a puff of smoke from a bottle. As a sign of his popularity, his artwork was also celebrated in two compilations, First Maitz: Selected Works (1988) and Dreamquests: The Art of Don Maitz (1993), and he was asked to do the cover and interior art for the first limited edition of Stephen King's Desperation (1996). In 1989, he married Wurts and relocated to Florida, and he has evidently kept very busy with a variety of projects while continuing to paint book covers; however, documenting all of his activities can be challenging. For example, he claims that he worked as a conceptual artist for two animated films, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001) and The Ant Bully (2006), but he was not officially credited for that work, and despite reports that he has painted album and CD covers, one struggles to locate a specific example. [JG/PN/GW]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →